Career Course

The one question I get asked often is when to bring up salary requirements during the interview process.

Some hiring managers I’ve talked to over the years have told me they don’t like when money is the first thing out of a job candidate’s mouth. But sometimes a job seeker just needs to know right away so they’re not wasting everyone’s time. It’s a fair thing to want to know and that’s exactly the dilemma of one of my long-time readers HikingStick.

If you missed it, check out his recent post on how he’s handling job loss.

I promi

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Instead of hiring employees, many companies are hiring independent contractors. While these openings were once only freelance writing positions or related artistic jobs, todays independent contractors can hold just about any open position. If youve been job hunting for a while, you might be ready to sign on the dotted line but before you take a contract position, here are a few things you need to know about these kinds of jobs:

• You have to pay your own taxes.

When youre an employee, your federal, state, and local taxes come right out of your paycheck, but as a contractor, youll likely have to pay this money on your own.

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Despite the initial pushback against social media by many pharma and biotech companies it appears that Twitter is emerging as the medium of choice for the life sciences industry. The main reasons for this trend are the 140 character world limit and the real time nature of Twitter. Unlike Facebook pages and blogs, where visitor’s comments (of any length) remain for indefinite periods of time, the information contained in tweets is minimal and their exposure time is second or minutes rather than days or months. T

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One of the largest private sector employers in India, IT services firm IBM is trimming its contract workforce. At least 600-1,000 contract employees have been asked to leave the company since August. Sources in the recruitment industry and the company attribute this to both economic uncertainty and cyclical reasons.

These contract employees work for IBM, but are on the payrolls of either a recruitment firm or another IT vendor. Two of the biggest providers of contract staff to IBM, who did not wish to be named, confirm this. One of them told ET that IBM had asked few hundreds of contract staffers to leave in August.

This vendor lost 40 such staffers, but this month placed 20 again.

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Crowdsourcing—using the collective talent of the Internet to solve problems—has been increasingly used to solve problems and find solutions in the computer software and electronics industry. Over the past few years, several forward-thinking life scientists had proposed the idea that crowdsourcing could possibly be used to solve the molecular structure of proteins that could be used as drug targets. To bring this possibility to reality, in 2008 a team of scientists at the University of Washington created an online, interactive, protein-folding game call Foldit that showcased the principle and properties of protein biochemistry. The

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